How much money do you allocate for traditional marketing? What about digital marketing? Do you have any idea how much you should be spending on these?
According to a healthcare marketing expert, mature healthcare organizations spend 7.5% of their revenue on marketing and 4.875% on digital marketing. For healthcare practitioners who are just starting, experts suggest investing more.
If you’ve been following the trends in healthcare marketing, you may have gone digital like most providers.
But you can easily make marketing mistakes that may cost you more. You may even lose your patients’ loyalty or your reputation.
We’ve discussed those mistakes in a previous blog, and below, we will walk you through the process of analyzing your digital marketing campaign. It might be time to find out how digital marketing services can help your medical practice.
Five Clues Your Practice Needs Digital Marketing Services
1. You think hiring web designers to create a great website is enough to get on top of the online market.
Many practitioners who are new to digital marketing think that as soon as they launch their website, patients will visit it. Yet digital analytics would show that potential patients rarely visit websites that don’t appear on search results pages.
The number of new visitors will range from 0-10, and usually, it would include you and your staff, and maybe some of your family members and friends. But you want to reach potential patients out there.
Tap into the “cold” market. This would include people who are searching Google for an optometrist or an affordable chiropractor.
Will their search results reveal your website?
If you’re an optometrist in Dallas, TX, try searching in Google “best optometrist near me.” Does your website show on page one of the search result? If so, congratulations! You must have done your digital marketing strategy well.
But if your website doesn’t appear on the next page, or even on the 9th page, then you’ve got some serious digital marketing to do. If this happens, try typing your website’s name on Google search. Brand new websites won’t even appear on search engine results even if you type the exact words you used to name your website.
This brings us to the second clue that indicates you need digital marketing help.
2. Your marketing campaign doesn’t generate website traffic.
What kind of marketing have you done to get the word out there that you are online? Websites are today’s digital business cards. Unless you give it out, or someone happens to see it, no one will pick it up or read it.
In our previous blog on how to analyze your health care marketing using metrics, we mentioned the three metrics you can use to check the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign.
If you’re scoring poorly on these metrics, find out why.
Factors that affect your digital marketing metrics
There are so many factors that could affect these metrics. It can be as trivial as your potential customers disliking your website design. Maybe you’ve hired a website designer who didn’t know how to make it responsive and adjust to the type of device prospects are using.
A great website should appear engaging on your laptop and desktop, as well as your smartphone and tablet. Look at it on the devices your potential patients will be using, and even through their lens. Do presbyopics have trouble reading your font size? Do the Millennials press the back button due to a turtle-paced loading time?
Read this blog on the components of a successful medical website. These five items don’t cover all, but it puts you in a better position to attract the right kind of patients. See where your website stands.
By now, you’d have learned that digital marketing is more than just having a website and getting patients to visit it.
Read this blog on how to make your practice’s website work for you so you can maximize your investment. This may give you some more clues that would indicate you need to boost your digital marketing campaign.
You may realize that you’ve narrowed your campaign and missed out on other opportunities. This leads us to the next clue.
3. The only digital marketing you know is email marketing.
Perhaps you’ve been sending email newsletters to your patients. This may include:
- An email reminder about their upcoming visits
- A reminder to get their flu shots and some tips on how to avoid getting the nasty bug
- An email that has a link to your online scheduling platform for ease and convenience
- A pre-visit survey on changes in their history and health status
- A post-visit review with a consent to post their testimonials on your website
Are there more strategies that you can do?
Visit the websites of top providers in your area and find inspiration from their digital marketing practices. What’s the look? What interfaces do they use? Are there ways they’ve added value to their practice with the use of digital marketing?
What about social media marketing? Do you have at least one social media platform where you engage your patients outside your clinic? You don’t have to be in all of them.
A recent survey revealed that 94.41% of the 3,371 hospitals have a Facebook page. For instance, look at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, ranked as the #1 in ophthalmology by U.S. News Rankings for Best Hospitals. You find them on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. Through these channels, they serve their patients beyond the confines of their physical facility.
Marketing your practice shouldn’t just benefit you. The more effective marketers look at their target audience as the primary beneficiaries.
You engage in social media marketing, social media campaigns, or even pay per click ads to get your practice out there. You won’t be able to serve patients until they come to your clinic. Yet in healthcare marketing, we also consider other factors.
In our blog, The Stark Truth Behind Healthcare Marketing, we mentioned three key areas you need to consider when marketing in social media for extra precaution. There are ethical and unethical ways, and you don’t want to make legal errors while building your practice.
Another clue that would indicate you need to call for marketing help is when:
4. You have no idea how investing in services for search engine optimization and local SEO will improve your online visibility
There can be a lot of digital marketing jargon. And a reliable digital marketing company can interpret all of it for you. The learning curve is steep, and you probably don’t have the time to learn the best SEO practices or even how to create effective pay-per-click ads or what keywords to use in your ad campaign and blogs.
You want a digital marketer like the Steeplechase Company who knows all these and more.
And finally:
5. You pay for content marketing services but neglect to look at the impact of reputation management and brand awareness.
You create blogs and newsletters for content marketing. But is that the only kind of content that you want on your website? Do you treat patients as your only target audience?
What about your employees? You can build your brand and create more brand awareness through your company’s involvement in the community. Showcase these events on your website and social media platforms.
Encouraging your staff to like your Facebook page or be part of the educational webinars you post on Youtube can boost your internet marketing. You’d have more page shares and employee engagement. You will exude a culture of inclusiveness and boost company morale.
We Can Help
You need not remain clueless about digital marketing. We can help you maximize your return on investment with your digital campaigns. Schedule your practice review here!
References:
Use of Social Media in Hospitals